The 72-year-old man suspected of carrying out a gun attack Saturday night at a dance studio in the Los Angeles area frequented the place and even gave lessons, friends and media reports said.

Authorities say Huu Cang Tran killed 10 people when he opened fire during a Lunar New Year celebration at the popular Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, east of Los Angeles.

Tran went to another dance club in the nearby city of Alhambra shortly after the massacre, police said, but there a customer grabbed his gun, which could have prevented another attack.

Tran later shot himself dead on Sunday when police approached the van he was driving.

“The suspect suffered gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene,” said Sheriff Robert Luna. He described a pursuit by police crews of the suspect, which ended with the man firing a shot from a white pickup truck, thus killing himself. .

The reason is not yet clear / “He was always nervous”

It is extremely rare for people over the age of 70 to commit a mass armed attack. Although authorities have not established a motive, some details about Tran’s past have emerged.

Adam Hood, who said he was Tran’s longtime tenant and spoke to him often, told Reuters that Tran was nervous, aggressive, distrustful, had few friends, but loved ballroom dancing, his main social activity.

“He was a good dancer,” said Hood, who met Trane in the early 2000s, “but he didn’t trust the people in the studio and was mean. I think he’s just fed up.”

According to Hood, Tran complained that people in the studio were talking behind his back. According to Hood, Tran, who was divorced, never remarried and did not have a girlfriend.

CNN reported, citing an anonymous friend, that Tran complained that dance teachers were talking “badly” about him and that Tran was “hostile” to many people in the studio.

Tran had a valid trucking license and previously owned a company called Tran’s Trucking starting in 2002. He lived in San Gabriel, near Monterey Park, from the early 1990s until about 2014, according to records.

In 2020, Tran moved into a home in a private gated senior community with a golf course in Hemet, about 90 minutes from Monterey Park. A Hemet police spokesman said there was no record of any complaints involving Tran.

It is unclear whether he continued to visit the Star Ballroom studio in later years.

He met his ex-wife at the studio about two decades ago, she said in an interview with CNN. Tran showed up and offered her free lessons.

Although Tran was never violent, he was quick to anger, such as if she missed a step during a dance, she told CNN. They divorced in 2005.

A database of 185 mass gun attacks between 1966 and 2022, maintained by the nonprofit The Violence Project, includes only one crime by a person 70 or older: a retired coal miner who killed five people at a convenience store in Allen , Kentucky in 1981. .